December 19, 2006

With the Christmas season well upon us I stumbled across this vitriolic attack on advertising and its detrimental effect on children by the Guardian.

According to some research done by National Consumer Council, 70% of three year olds don't know their own surname but can recognise the golden arches of MacDonalds.

THe Compass Thinktank estimates that your average child in the UK, US or Australia is exposed to 20,000 to 40,000 TV ads per year.

And as the ultimate proof of the power of brand culture, children named after brands themselves - researchers came across 300 Armanis, a number of L'Oreals and even an ESPN!

The effects of this exposure has been summarised by the Guardian as follows:

Not only are children being made miserable by a philosophy which suggests you can find happiness only through endless material consumption, but this commercialisation is shaping all our futures. People brought up as super-consumers and brand addicts will carry this unsustainable culture into the next half-century.

Bearing in mind this is the industry that some of us work in and some of us want to get into, do you agree that advertising is killing our values as a society? How can we make changes to how we market products and services to ensure we avoid rotting the minds of children?

October 05, 2006

Than in national newspapers by the end of the year. That's the prediction based on the current figures for the amount of money being spent in online advertising as reported by Brand Republic. Check out the full article here. One quote though that I will add here is

The UK is the first market where internet advertising [spend] has moved into double digits

The only sectors of advertising that are growing are the ones that are focused on building relationships with consumers - Direct Marketing and Digital.

TV ad spend is decreasing, possibly because consumers are becoming more demanding - they want the interactivity, personalisation and individuality the intertnet offers in everything. Where they don't find it, they switch off.

Maybe. It's just an idea. Check out the following links to find out some more if you are interested:

October 04, 2006

This is an explanation about the industry that has got me through those conversations with friends who ask me who I work for. It's not that interesting but if you can get it now when you start applying for things it'll give you a clearer picture of who you are trying to work for and also show you have done a bit of research. Never a bad thing.

Basically all the advertising, marketing, pr and media agencies in the world are all owned by one of the following (I'm deliberately ignoring all the independent agencies to make it easier to explain) :

Omnicom is the biggest in terms of something called market capitalisation - which is how much money would be available if they sold all their shares at once at any given time. It is something around the $16 billion mark.

Omnicom is basically a holding company - they are not an agency in themselves, they only own other agencies. They don't produce any advertising, they leave that up to the agencies they own.

One of the divisions of Omnicom is DAS or to use its full title Diversified Agency Services. DAS is where all the agencies that aren't advertising are 'kept.' So, it has responsibility for all the direct marketing, digital, sales promtions, branding, healthcare and pr agencies that belong to Omnicom all over the world.

And every year, DAS London run a graduate scheme called Accelerate, and my time on the scheme motivated me to create this site to help students who want to get into marketing improve their knowledge of the industry and therefore their chances of getting a job.